Let Keanu Reeves punch and shoot his way onto your summer reading list
Who or what can’t Keanu Reeves beat in a fight? The titan of action cinema, who has also recently expanded his enthusiasm and prowess to video games, has been taking on a new foe of late: literature. What started as a wildly successful venture into comic books with the Kickstarter-funded series BRZRKR, co-created by Matt Kindt and Ron Garney, has now expanded into Reeves’ first co-written novel, The Book of Elsewhere.
Don’t worry if you’re not familiar — The Book of Elsewhere is not solely for fans of BRZRKR, but it’s a good fit for fans of Keanu Reeves. A philosophical, violent thriller about an immortal soldier pondering the nature of his existence, The Book of Elsewhere has an elegance that might surprise you for a pulp thriller, thanks to Reeves’ chosen collaborator: weird-fiction legend China Miéville.
Miéville is a prolific and wide-ranging writer known as one of the preeminent voices in the “new weird” canon of the ’90s and ’00s, with novels like Perdido Street Station, Embassytown, and The City & the City that, generally speaking, applied the cosmic horror sensibilities of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers to other genres — most often urban fantasy, in Miéville’s case. His presence as Reeves’ narrative collaborator on The Book of Elsewhere immediately makes it more interesting, even for those who aren’t already fans of the comic.
Because while BRZRKR is a hell of a thrill ride, it takes some doing to expand into a worthwhile novelistic experience. The story of an immortal warrior named Unute, or “B,” BRZRKR’s 12-issue narrative is an ultra-violent fable about a warrior-poet of sorts, an 80,000-year-old man with the might of a demigod in search of an end to his immortal condition. He doesn’t want to die, he repeatedly says; he just wants to be able to. To this end, Unute has struck a devil’s bargain with the United States government: He does dangerous black ops work for the military, and in exchange they get to study him to see if anything about his
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